Witch for Hire by N. E. Conneely Read Free Book Online

rain picked up, and washed away the residue. The other spells I would be casting had the potential to be augmented with rituals, but this wasn't exactly a spell. I let down my shields and cast my magic out, but I made it sticky so it would cling to other magic. As the net settled across the area I shifted my eyesight so I could see it as well as feel the power.
    "Jones, grab some colored flags and drift a bit of power around you. It should stick to the magic spots. Stick a flag in them and move on. I can't walk about and maintain this, but I can tell you if you're in the right spot." He nodded and moved off. If I had set this up as a spell or used runes to cast this I wouldn't be bound to one spot, but to maintain magic in a specific shape outside of my body took a lot of concentration and visualization. For ten minutes he walked across the area, stopping when he felt his magic pull, looked to me to make sure he was planting the flag in the right spot, pulled his magic off the anchor, and moved on. When Jones found the last spot I undid the magic and waited for him to make his way around the hole. There were forty-seven flags in the ground, making mostly neat circles around the center of the hole.
    "Well, a spell didn't make the crater, but there was a spell involved." I sighed.
    "Good job, Michelle. I couldn't have done that."
    "Thanks, why don't you tell the sheriff what we found. I'm going to grab a drink and some equipment so we can work on the rest of this stuff." Jones nodded and headed off. I turned back to the car, glad I'd brought a thermos of tea. I gulped down a bit of it before picking up my regular bag and a spare bag out of the trunk. I arrived back at the edge of the big hole to find Jones already there.
    "Ah, Michelle, you will be happy to hear that the zookeepers finally figured out there are ten trolls missing. The coroner hauled off the bodies while we were working and called to say that they are both trolls, so we have eight trolls on the loose. We still don't know who did it." Jones looked happy but I wasn't sure how much easier this made things for me. Tracking creatures was tricky.
    "I don't know if I can track the trolls, or whoever did this. Usually you need part of that individual or something special to them for a tracking spell to work. It isn't the easiest thing to do." I felt stupid and defeated, but few other witches would have been able to do more.
    "We'll work on that in a few minutes. You're forgetting, you need to figure out what kind of magic is in that hole."
    "Oops." The long morning was wearing on my concentration. "Which residue was the strongest?"
    "This way." Jones guided me to a flag near the center of the blast.
    Kneeling down I let my power flow over and around the little glob of foreign magic. The texture of my power changed, asking the other magic what it did. A simple answer returned, "Clean." I pushed at it a bit more; getting the feeling it hadn't had enough time to finish its job.
    "That was simple enough." Jones was too tired to ask, he just stared at me. "It's a cleaning spell, though I don't think it finished its job. I can't tell you what type of cleaning spell, that's all I'm going to get, but it had to be a big spell to leave this much behind."
    "Eh, good enough. We've got other things to work on. Could you do something with a fingerprint without destroying it or altering it in a way that would make it difficult for us to process?" I could tell he was thinking about something clever.
    "Fingerprints leave skin cells and oil behind, right?"
    "Yes."
    "Then I can do something with that. Can you take me to the fingerprint, or bring it to me?"
    "This way."
    I didn't know how many other witches had done what I was about to attempt, but it was going to be fun. He brought me to a tent containing bagged evidence and had the person in charge of that piece of evidence take it out and put it in front of me before shooing everyone away. I pulled a small piece of gravel and a grease